Friday, 10th of June, 2005

Somebody forgot to write reviews. Oops!
And I’ve read some really great stuff of late. Here’s something that pretty much tops the list, and I’m very embarrassed for not reviewing it yet. Disclaimer: I’m in the thank-you list at the end of this book, because I gave Al some minutely helpful double bass-related advice while he was writing it.
Disclaimer-the-second: I’m currently reading the second part of Al’s new novel, Pushing Ice. It’s hard science fiction, and excellent stuff!

Century Rain, on the other hand, is not exactly hard sf. On the other hand, give or take some wormholes and other bits of quantum hand-waving, it’s not really that far from hard sf either. But the genre question is the really interesting thing here, because Century Rain is also only half “science fiction” at all. Its other half is a beautifully done noir detective thriller, set in a jazz-soaked Paris seemingly belonging to an alternate time-stream in which WWII never happened, but the consequence is a sortof “soft” fascist Europe, with technology stuck at 1940’s levels. Our hero here is Willard Floyd, a most engaging cynical detective who also happens to be a not-very-successful jazz musician.

It’s quite some time since I read Century Rain now, and what sticks is the imagery, both in the future and “past” strands. The future in this case features an Earth devastated by a runaway nanotech disaster, with humanity living solely in space, in two factions: the Threshers, who attempt to eschew most nanotechnology, and the Slashers (yes, named after Slashdot), who believe in living in the now and using nanotechnology to its utmost limit. Our heroine of the future strand is Verity Auger, who prefers to be known by her last name, despite being estranged from her husband Peter Auger. She’s considerably more cynical and hard-boiled than Floyd, and is a specialist in ancient history - ie pre-catastrophe Earth. We start with Verity down on Earth doing some dangerous work collecting artefacts, when something goes terribly wrong and one of her two students is invaded by a “Fury” - that is, a runaway utility fog (hey!) or nanotech cloud which we get the feeling isn’t exactly intelligent but is dangerously destructive.

When Verity gets back to her orbital home she’s in deep shit. The boy can only be saved using Slasher technology, and what’s more it turns out that the other “child”, Cassandra, is actually an adult Slasher who was there in an observational capacity. Shortly Verity is given an offer she can’t refuse: to get off the hook, for the moment anyway, the sortof “Special Ops” of the Threshers send her on a very bizarre mission, to investigate some very odd artefacts that seem to come from a Paris from a past that doesn’t quite make sense… and the woman who was sent in before her seems to have dissappeared.

Meanwhile, Floyd has been investigating a case of a young woman’s apparent suicide. Her landlord is convinced it was murder, and some very spooky “children” seem to keep appearing at odd moments. The Paris scenes are drawn in a delightfully evocative manner, and I truly wished I could be in Paris while reading them.
Naturally, you can see that the two plots are going to collide soon. On the way there, we get to meet some bizarre and brilliant Weird Tech. Verity and Floyd are of course investigating the same thing from different angles, and their trajectories inevitably collide.

One of the fascinatingly original things about this book is the way that the sensibilities of hard sf (or at least far-future New Space Opera) and noir are commingled. It would be giving too much away to show just how, but rest assured that you get space battles and space chases, factional alliances, characters growing as people, and some stunning imagery. It’s Al’s best book yet, and that’s saying something. Plenty of people have written better reviews than me about this book, so go buy it and enjoy it for yourself!

By the way, Charlie Stross’s masterwork Accelerando is out soon, and I’m also in the acknowledgements for that one. A huge honour. Check out the link, buy it as soon as it comes out. It’s right at the forefront of current-day sf. ‘Nuff said.

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